 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown. Today we're talking about Susan Stepping, a key figure in the history of analytic philosophy. She played a really important role in facilitating dialogue between the British philosophers known as the Cambridge analysts and the Austrian and Germanin logical positivists or logical empiricists, like Rudolf Karnapp, who we talked about last time. Stepping helped craft between these two movements a kind of shared identity of analytic philosophy in ways that I'll talk about in a moment. Stepping was born in 1885 in London and died in 1943. She was the first woman to earn a position of full professor of philosophy in the United Kingdom at Bedford College. Stepping was heavily influenced by, especially G.E. Moore, but also Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She helped introduce these early British analytic philosophers to the logical positivists between the wars, facilitating visits of philosophers like Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Karnapp. She was a co-founder of the journal Analysis, which is still an important journal of analytic philosophy today. Stepping also, in many ways, anticipated the post-World War II movement of Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy, another important development in the history of analytic philosophy. She often in her work emphasized the wisdom and the adequacy inherent in our everyday language for dealing at least with ordinary experience. Her first major work, which earned her a lot of acclaim, was a modern introduction to logic, published in 1930, revised in 1933. It was not simply a textbook in formal logic, it also included discussions of the older Aristotelian logic, topics in the history of logic, discussion of scientific method, and a variety of topics concerning linguistic analysis. In a sense, it's really more like the first textbook in analytic philosophy, more so than it is like contemporary introductions to modern formal logic. Stepping's work throughout her career increasingly turned to popular and socially relevant uses of analytic philosophy. Another major work pictured here is her thinking to some purpose, published in 1939, a fairly practical public-facing book on critical thinking. Here, Stepping focuses on the critical analysis of persuasive rhetoric, breaking down things like political speeches, showing how they mislead their audiences, and really helping people to think about how not to let persuasive speech sort of bias them, or take advantage of them. So really important work. An important essay for understanding Steppen's contributions to the method of analytic philosophy, and our main topic of discussion today, is this work, the method of analysis in metaphysics. She says here from the very beginning that she wishes to make clear that, in her opinion, metaphysics is a distinctive branch of philosophy, so not hear a term of abuse like it is for Carnap and some of the logical positivists, not something to be overcome, as both Heidegger and Carnap thought, but just a branch of philosophy, one kind of topic that philosophers undertake. What is metaphysics? According to Stepping, metaphysics is a systematic study concerned to show what is the structure of the facts in the world to which reference is made, with varying degrees of indirectness, whenever a true statement is made. There's a number of different contrasts in the essay. One contrast she brings up is to a traditional philosopher named McTaggart, who describes metaphysics as the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality. Stepping tells us that the method there is to posit sort of fundamental principles of ultimate reality, and then derive mundane facts or facts about the apparent reality from them by deduction. She'll tell us again and again that she thinks this is the wrong method for metaphysics to proceed by. So if we turn to a passage on page 70, Stepping says this, sort of elaborating on her account of what metaphysics is, she says the business of metaphysics is to show, one, what exactly we are believing when we believe that there is a table in this room, that it was here three hours ago and so on, how our various beliefs are interrelated, and how our inconsistent beliefs may be adjusted, and which should be rejected. Thus, metaphysics aims at making precise the reference of all true beliefs. And remember, Frege, when you see that word reference, it's the same same concept. For this purpose, analysis is indispensable. So there's this core concept, it's there in the title of the essay, and it's here in this explanation of what metaphysics is doing, is this notion of analysis, which again, the kind of metaphysical analysis she's talking about, she takes a great, she's sort of a great pains to distinguish from this, this project of constructing a postulational system, as she says. So we should then ask, okay, what for Stepping is analysis? And she describes, I think, three different approaches. There's the one already mentioned, which she sometimes calls the postulational method, or sometimes calls symbolic analysis. And this is what the sort of bad old traditional metaphysics does. It postulates some principles of ultimate reality. You know, you can imagine Thales, everything is made of water, or the idealists, ultimate reality is our ideas. And then you deduce the consequences of those metaphysical claims, those metaphysical principles, and then you try to either recover or dismiss the appearances, the sort of mundane facts that we believe. A second form of analysis, which she talks about, is what we might, what she calls grammatical analysis. Elsewhere, you might consider calling logical analysis. This is concerned with reformulating statements from ambiguous or vague ordinary language into more unambiguous, more logically clear forms. And so the concepts kind of stay on the same level, but it becomes more clear. And then what she calls metaphysical analysis, metaphysical analysis decomposes complex facts into more and more, as she says, basic facts that ground the meaning or truth of the mundane facts. So let's consider an example. This is the example from from Steving's paper, economists are fallible, right. So this is this is predicating a certain property of being fallible, which means that they could be wrong, right, they have, you know, they're not perfect, right, of economists. Now, if we're doing logical or grammatical analysis, we might be trying to just make this a little more clear. So when we when we say economists are fallible, what we're really doing is we're talking about some some property that every economist has. So every economist is fallible, is perhaps a somewhat clearer version of this, right. And if we want to get even clearer, we might use the machinery of modern formal logic, like predicate logic to express this, right, this says, for all x, if ex, then fx, right. So e might be a predicate that means economist, f might be a predicate that means fallible. And so this says, in a more logically rigid way, for all x, if x is an economist, then fx is a fallible, right. Just another way of saying every economist is fallible. This is just the grammatical or logical kind of analysis. And so not what she's really trying to get at in this paper. The other kind of analysis she's concerned with is metaphysical analysis. Metaphysical analysis is also what she calls directional, right. It moves from complexes to more basic or simple facts, right. So when we say economists are fallible, or every economist is fallible. What makes that true, presumably, is a more complex is a more is a statement that is more complex in one way, but also more simple in another way. It's a statement like Carl Marx is fallible, and John Maynard Keynes is fallible, and Muhammad Yunus is fallible, and Amartya Sen is fallible, and so on and so forth, right. This takes the general abstract claim about every economist, and actually points out that what, what makes that true is facts about a bunch of particular persons, right, who happen to be economists. That takes that term economists, which is a complex combination of things, right, and decomposes it into the persons that are collected together under that category, Marx and Keynes and Yunus and Sen and Friedman and so forth, right. Possibly this is not the last sort of stage of the analysis, right. So, you know, this is maybe, this is maybe a resultant, but not the resultant in the kind of vocabulary of the essay. Possibly there's some further level of analysis where we take a complex like fallible and decompose it into the things that constitute fallibility, or we take a term Carl Marx. If Carl Marx is not a simple or basic thing, right, then we can decompose Carl Marx perhaps into some social and psychological and biological facts, possibly even physical facts, if that's the way the world works, right. So, this is the form of metaphysical analysis that Stepping is getting at. So, I hope that gives you a quick sort of entree into Stepping's approach and her way of thinking about metaphysics. I think it's important to note that this is a very different approach than both Heidegger and Carnap as I said before. Stepping is definitely not against metaphysics, although she is of course against a traditional way of doing metaphysics, but not for the kind of Kantian sort of reasons that Heidegger and Carnap are worried about. She thinks there's no sort of no real problem with metaphysics as a type of inquiry, as long as it is analytical in the way that she's talking about, and not postulational. Maybe that actually does get at some of the worries that Heidegger and Carnap have. That'd be worth talking about in class, or on Discord, or in the comments of this video. Otherwise, I will look forward to talking to you, and I will see you next time.